I have done some things in my life as a volunteer, but it never came to me when I was criticized about that work to say: "Hey, that's a volunteer work, what do you want from me?"

Either work is done well or not. If not, than it is legitimate to say: Yes, I see that this is not very good, but I'm a volunteer and I just do not have more time for it. So it is going to remain like this. However, in a project with a lot of developers, and with an issue that has been known at least since 2006 (another guy says since 2004), I really think that something is... well... not quite...

Back to the original point - gedit "the official text editor of the GNOME desktop environment" is particularly useless in this respect. Its had this bug for ever and the maintainers actively rejected a patch that fixed it for a while.

I have a dumb tv box that produces simple text files, which often end-up with a single null character at the end. The problem is not noticed by windoze users, but they cannot be opened in gedit.Of course mint does come with an editor that works - vi - shows the windows line endings and a ^@ at the end.

Install wine, which has a port of 20-year old(?) windoze notepad and wordpad - they both can open the file, notepad hides/ignores the character, wordpad puts a square box symbol. My preferred editor, on both windoze and linux (running under wine) when not in an ide is notepad++, that tells your the character is gedit is NULL.

Note the problem is deeper than just gedit - meld obviously uses the same file open code, winmerge works fine (on windows and under wine!).

I once tried to open a perfectly valid text file (mysqldump created) with a 5MB line in gedit - never again! After rebooting I was able to make the required change with notepad++

The best thing about Linux is you have plenty of choice, what was wrong with vi - <ESC>:wq